i m not going to shoot him. i m going to kill him with my two bare hands. i m going to do to him what he did to rachel. reporter: tim cherrington, the man who failed to commit and then watched the love of his life go on to her terrible end, has his own way of taking revenge, mostly on himself. kind of a tragic love story from your point of view? it is, it is. reporter: i mean, this is a woman you could ve spent the rest of your life with. very, very easily could, yes. i should have pulled the trigger when i had that chance, you know. i blew it. i didn t, you know, give her the ring earlier. reporter: well, you re still paying for it, aren t you? yeah. yes, i am, yeah. that s a tough one. reporter: different kind of thinking across the country, among the friends of that other mrs. winkler, the one whose death on a lonely mountain road, is still officially labelled, accident. i mean, this is a beautiful woman who gave so much, was so nurturing and caring. i don t feel l
focused, disciplined. a former f-16 fighter pilot, who was on track to be a corporate leader. tim scrambled. and i went and bought a ring real quick to propose to her. and i did. it was too late by then, of course. rachel turned him down, and announced her engagement to todd. it was really hard, you know, because the love of my life was leaving me for some guy that had a good job and a house and a boat and a nice car. tim, to me, was rachel s soul mate. he was nothing but loving and kind to her. we were both twenty-once. hard to watch, said rachel s closest friend, shannon thurman. she called me when she broke up with him and said, you know we re done. i wanna have a family, he s not ready to have a family. and so, you know, we re done. and then literally like two months later, she called me and said, you know, you need to be here in two days, i m getting married. and i was like, oh, great. you guys made made up. and she s like, no, we didn t make up. we yo
directing tim. don hatfield thought his daughter would outgrow tim. after all, rachel, unlike tim, buckled down and went to college. you know, graduates at top of her class at sonoma state, recruited by deloitte and touche and they started her out at $80k. we want you not, i wanna do a little business of my own, you know? and she and tim would run around and do stuff. reporter: paint murals and so forth? yeah. reporter: were they any good? not really. but she loved him nonetheless. fourteen years this went on. rachel wanted to get married and have kids. and i haven t asked her to marry me yet. and reporter: did you wanna have kids? i did. i did. i did, but i just wasn t there yet, you know what i m saying? well. it s an old story, isn t it? tim was blindsided by what happened next. rachel met another man, someone who was everything tim was not. todd winkler.
oh, [beep]. i m sorry. we re starting, huh? reporter: well. just whatever. hmm start again. reporter: what d that do to you when i said that? my heart just went, boom. the subject of rachel, as you can plainly see, is painful for tim cherrington. a pain that might lessen if he d only learn to forget. but all he can do is remember. like the night they first met. it was a july night, a party. and she was dancing. and i said, wow, i m gonna meet that girl. reporter: how old were you? i was 18 and i think she was 17. reporter: oh. wow. love-drunk teens. they set up house together. that s tim during those giddy years, rarely serious. looking like a character from the movie dazed and confused . and there s rachel, unconsciously glamorous. like some movie star in her own romantic comedy, with a plot that was all too familiar. aspiring artists waiting for their break. reporter: could she see making a life as a painter?
and then one day she called me into her office. this is in june, beginning of june of 2010. she said, have a seat. and i said, okay. i thought i was in trouble. and she leaned over from her chair and she grabbed my hand and says, james, i got something i really need to tell you. i thought i was, like, you re fired. [ laughter ] no, she said, i ve fallen hopelessly in love with you, and i don t know what to do about it. reporter: what was it like to hear that? it was a huge relief. reporter: relief? yeah. reporter: because you were in love with her. i was already in love with her at the time, but i couldn t tell her. i didn t feel that i should tell her. you know, i wouldn t know how she would react. i d rather have her as my friend than have her as nothing at all. reporter: so having left artist tim to marry ex-fighter pilot todd, rachel now launched into an affair with ex-marine james. this, by the way, wasn t one of those sneak off into a closet and steal a